The Predictable Failure of David Cunliffe (Ctd)

The new messiah, David Cunliffe, has managed to lose them 10% of the vote since then.

This was very, very predictable. I have been predicting it for ages.

David Cunliffe is dead set useless, and Labour should have run some polls to see what the population thought of him before they selected him as leader. His negatives were seriously high to being with, so he was always going to tank Labour’s vote.

Having high negatives is not career ending. Helen Clark demonstrated this, when she managed to take Labour down to 14% in the polls, with a 2% preferred Prime Minister rating.

The big difference between Cunliffe and Clark is that Clark had spent years if not decades building Labour’s internal strength. She had good organisers throughout the party, with Heather Simpson coordinating it all. She had a great shakedown artist in Mike “Fat Tony” Williams, who raise the funds and coshed donors who were thinking of giving to the other side. She had capable political operatives who were working to her plan through the party.

Contrast this with David Cunliffe. He has had fifteen years in Parliament and didn’t have a team ready for when he took over the leadership. He had done bugger all work in the party, so the party didn’t have good people ready to implement a good plan. He had a podgy pommy poofter running the party, a man who was rumoured to have missed out on a cabinet post due to his fondness for young boys. His podgy pommy poofter had no fundraising ability, and didn’t turn up to meetings arranged by Fat Tony to collect six figure cheques, as a consequence Cunliffe has had no money to fight the campaign.

Fifteen years in parliament. Probably a life time of dreaming about being PM and Cunliffe didn’t have a plan to win. He didn’t do the work necessary to win. He followed Bill English’s playbook, not Helen Clark’s.

David Cunliffe has been a disaster for Labour. The problem for Labour is they need to ask themselves who has done the work that Clark has done to build a competent team? Who can collect the donations that are needed to win an election? Who has got the likability factor that means people will pick the phone up again when Labour calls?

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As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. And when he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet, and as a result he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist that takes no prisoners.